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As Fuduntu grows, so does the need for experienced volunteers. In our last request from the community for volunteers, several people reached out and helped us and, thanks to them, more has gotten done in the last few months than we could have done without them.

"The successful release of 1.0 last November was largely the result of the assistance we received from a relatively small group of dedicated volunteers. As we continue making improvements to the functionality of Miro - we also need to continue to improve the QA and increase the number volunteers..."

Many of these problems are with volunteer software in general, not Free Software in particular. Hobbyist proprietary programs are often hard to use for many of the same reasons. But the easiest way of getting volunteers to contribute to a program is to make it open source. And while thousands of people are now employed in developing Free Software, most of its developers are volunteers.

When it comes to code, Google's support has made a big difference to the Tor Project. Providing privacy and helping to circumvent censorship online is a challenge that keeps our software developers and volunteers very busy. The Google Summer of Code brings students and mentors in the open source community together to write code for three months every year.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program (http://www.lpi.org). Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization's new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization).

The thing about volunteers is that they don't have to do what they're doing. If you're getting paid to hang out in an IRC channel and answer questions all day, that's one thing. If you're hanging out on an IRC channel all day because you want to, that's another.

"Hardware recycling in Richmond took a leap forward last weekend. A small group of Richmond volunteers toured Free Geek Columbus. We learned much from visit. One valuable detail I’ll focus on today is that they run their organization on web-based, database-driven software system called “fgdb.rb”.

"The recent launch of Stephen Fry's film in celebration of GNU's 25th anniversary has been a success on a number of levels — including for PlayOgg.org , the campaign for free audio and video formats. Worldwide, people have reached out to thank us and offer their support, including dozens of volunteers who have translated the film into over 24 languages.